Category Archives: PowerShell DSC

On 3rd of May the one day country event of the Experts Live conference series will take place at the “Workspace Welle 7” in Bern and I am really looking forward to join this event as a speaker. Together with my colleague and fellow MVP Michael Rueefli I will have a talk about Infrastructure as Code and DevOps.

We will show you what the buzzword Infrastructure as Code actually means and how Infrastructure as Code can be used in the real world in real projects and environments. Furthermore we will give you some guidelines how you can leverage DevOps principals for platform and infrastructure automation so you, as an IT Pro, will be ready for the new agile and and fast pacing future of IT.

If you never heard about the Experts Live Switzerland Event here some more details why you should join us on May 3rd in Bern 🙂

One day Conference

Completely held in German

17 Sesssions

3 parallel Tracks

Top Community Speakers

Max. 180 attendees

Exhibitors area for partner

Initiated and managed by the community

modern and easily accessible location

Focus on Microsoft Cloud, Datacenter and Workplace topics

Ah! And if you have not already, register you right away. Only a very small amount of tickets are left!

Apparently, there are some incompatibilities when WMF 5.0 computers wants to communicate with a DSC pull server running on WMF 5.1 or vice versa. This is especially the case when the “client” node and the pull server are not running the same OS version. For example, when you have a DSC pull server running on Server 2012 R2 (with WMF 5.0) and some DSC nodes running on Server 2016 (which as WMF 5.1 built in).

Currently I experienced two issues:

A DSC pull client running on WMF 5.1 cannot send status reports when the DSC pull server is running still on WMF 5.0. This is because WMF 5.1 has invented the new “AdditinalData” parameter in the status report. I have reported this bug also on GitHub: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/2921

Solution / Workaround for issue 1:As the WMF 5.1 RTM no (again) available the simplest solution would be to upgrade the server and/or client to WMF 5.1. However, when you have to upgrade the DSC pull server then you must create a new EDB file and reregister all clients. Otherwise the issue preserve because the “AdditionalData” field is still missing in the database.

Solution / Workaround for issue 2:The root cause of this issue can be found in the release notes of WMF 5.1:
“Previously, the DSC pull client only supported SSL3.0 and TLS1.0 over HTTPS connections. When forced to use more secure protocols, the pull client would stop functioning. In WMF 5.1, the DSC pull client no longer supports SSL 3.0 and adds support for the more secure TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 protocols.”

So, starting with WMF 5.1 the DSC pull server does not support TLS 1.0 anymore, but in reverse a DSC pull client running on WMF 5.0 is still using TLS 1.0 and can therefore not connect anymore to the DSC pull server.

The solution, without deploying WMF 5.1 to all pull clients, is to alter the behavior of the DSC pull server so he accepts again TLS 1.0 connections. This can be done by changing the following registry key on the DSC pull server:

Tomorrow, on Tuesday October 11 2016 at 2pm (CEST) I will do a webinar in German about Azure Automation and PowerShell DSC . I will explain the basic concepts of Azure Automation, Automation Runbook and PowerShell DSC.

A main part of the webinar will be a example scenario to automatically deploy and configure a VM using Azure Automation Runbooks and Azure Automation DSC. I will configure the whole scenario live during the webinar.

When you interested in the scripts, which I am using to configure the scenario, you can get it here.

If you like to attend the webinar you can still register here for free.

Lately I had to rebuild the Hyper-V Hosts in my home lab several times because of the release of the different TPs for Windows Server 2016. This circumstance (and because I am a great fan of PowerShell DSC ) gave me the Idea to do the whole base configuration of the Hyper-V Host, including the LBFO NIC Teaming, vSwitch and vNICs for the converged networking configuration, through PowerShell DSC.
But soon I realized that the DSC Resource Kit from Microsoft provides DSC resources only for a subset of the needed configuration steps. The result was some PowerShell modules with my custom DSC resources.

My custom DSC resources for the approach:

– cLBFOTeam: To create and configure the Windows built-in NIC Teaming
– cVNIC: To create and configuring virutal network adapters for Hyper-V host management
– cPowerPlan: To set a desired Power Plan in Windows (e.g. High Performance Plan)

You can get the moduels from the PowerShell Gallery (Install-Module) or from GitHub. They will hopefully help everyone who has a similar intend

More to come:Yes, I am not quite finished yet and I have more in the pipline.
Currently I am also working on a fork of the xHyperV Module with a adopteted xVMSwitch resource with a paramter to specify the MinimumBandwidth mode of the Switch.
Futuremore I am also planing to add support for the SET (Swicht Embedded Teaming) in Windows Server 2016 to the xVMSwitch resource.

So you may soon read more about this topic here. In the meantime, happy DSCing!